ABSTRACT
The coda to the first movement of the Seventh String Quartet is a mere fifteen measures long. Understood in the terms of a supplement, the coda becomes a signifier of the death of the movement: it gives life to the rest of the music. This chapter describes that society's means of acknowledging death requires the actual death to be properly followed by symbolic death, which inscribes the memory of the dead into societal tradition. From the coda/supplement/death perspective, the quartet enacts the standard cultural trope of actual death followed by symbolic death, with the second movement seemingly performing a funeral rite for the death marked by the coda of the first movement. The task of remembrance, the second death, which the second movement was unable to perform, is properly accomplished in the postlude to the fugue as the end of the third movement.
